December 22, 2003

shynola bowling hardware firefly...

Give me caffeine, or give me death, I say. Actually, maybe no more caffeine, since I was drinking a can of Coke this morning at about 11.15 when I got all dizzy, and thought I'd started with the stimulants too early, only it was the Central Californian earthquake making odd rolling motions up here in San Jose. Go figure.

So, leafing through a magazine at the local Tower Records, I note that my current music video heroes, Shynola, have been hired to create all the Guide entries in Hammer And Tongs' film adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Damn. Apart from Chris Cunningham actually directing Neuromancer, something that seems pretty unlikely now, I can think of few other things more likely to fill me with Christmas cheer.

Times when you know you've been hanging around online for too long? When you surf obscure arcade game manufacturer websites long enough that you find bizarrely posed bowling game flyers, and giggle happily all the same. Look at the veins on Parker Bohn III's arm, too. Not to mention the beautiful moustache and furrowed brow. You go, Parker!

Finally, there's been a couple of television-based feasts that have caught my eye recently. Firstly, Showtime had the cult robot slasher flick Hardware on a few weeks back, and I finally got to watching it. Interestingly, Kevin O'Neill, the illustrator for Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is listed as a co-writer, and it turns out the film's plot was extensively borrowed without the slightest permission from an old 2000 AD comic, which O'Neill drew, hence a post-release credit.

But the film itself... wow. It's obviously low-budget, and borderline gory to boot (I suspect it should be much more gory still in an uncut version), but it has the oddest feeling of post-apocalyptic, voyeuristic, gritty, prescient style about it. There's an unofficial Richard Stanley site which has more info about the enigmatic, definitely cultlike director, including his barely-released documentary about the Nazi historians who were genuinely pursuing the Holy Grail.

The other thing that's impressed me is something I should have perhaps got to watching when it was on TV, thereby stopping it from being shelved. That would be Joss Whedon's superlative Firefly, tragically cancelled after just 14 episodes. I've only watched the first three so far (I'm Netflix-ing the DVD set a disc at a time), but.. wow. Again, I'm not so into space operas aside from Babylon 5, but the 'space western' stylings, convention-bending ideas, and beautiful, beautiful casting make it a show I dearly wish was still around.

Posted by h0l211 at 11:22 PM

December 15, 2003

legaltorrent nuon sfc craziness..

Something that happened since I last wrote - the launch of LegalTorrents, the legal BitTorrent ('focused P2P' app) net.label download site we've set up (we being myself, Reed from GameTab lending a little BitTorrent/webpage expertise, and Brandon from Please Do Something helping out with webspace/bandwidth.) Seems like BitTorrent is a great way to spread large amounts (5gb, tens of hours!) of free music, especially when you have a local seed providing faster download speeds, and the Creative Commons weblog and even Lawrence Lessig have been saying nice things about our endeavor so far. Over time, we plan to get better .nfo files (with song details/Creative Commons specifics) embedded in the ZIPs, and expand the amount of content offered (possibly into areas besides music, eventually!)

Compared to this blatant excitement, everything else pales into insignificance. We had a nice party for both Holly's and our friend Jon's birthday at the weekend, where-in various guests were transfixed by the wonder of Jeff Minter's psychedelic llama Nuon VLM music-visuals app, and a little Taisen Tanto-R was played on my arcade machine, and.. yes, I am a geek, what of it?

Oh, and I'm in the middle of writing scrolltexts. For the Commodore 64, even. This should bear fruit in a project to be released on Monotonik in early 2004, but it's nice to be doing some weird-ass stupid surreal writing and getting back to the old school all at once.

Finally, some of the trolls at Slashdot are being very sweet, if only they weren't both kidding and riffing on the troll-tastic GNAA (if you don't know what that is, then you should be thankful.) Viva la Anti-Slash!

Posted by h0l211 at 10:26 PM

December 05, 2003

work stiller alexa cat action?

Well, instead of winding down towards Xmas, work commitments seem to be winding up a bit, but I'm confident we'll breeze through everything and get to Christmas time in one piece - yay!

Comedy Central has been showing, late at night, Ben Stiller Show episodes, since the DVD has just come out, I got a chance to catch one or two for the first time - unsurprisingly, it never made it to the UK. And, by gosh, they're pretty darn good - Ben, Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick and Bob Odenkirk all went on to be slightly more famous than they were at this point, and the U2 bar mitzvah spoof in the first episode is priceless.

There's always been some debate about whether Alexa, which indexes website popularity, is actually fair, or whether it can be biased by just a few users. But I hadn't seen a good example of someone messing with it until a friend pointed out some Shacknews messageboard users initiated a campaign earlier this year to get everyone to download and use the Alexa toolbar (which is how they work out popularity rankings), plus visit Shacknews like they normally do. You can check out the results for yourself - a not-unimpressive jump from 20,000-ish ranked to 2,500-ish was the end product, though it's wandered back down again now. Conclusion? Don't really have one, other than Alexa is probably a half-decent arbiter for the top 1,000 sites or so, and maybe the top 5,000 when people don't make efforts to skew it.

Finally, I noticed cat pawprints on the back window of my car a couple of months back, and a few weeks ago saw a cat sitting on the roof of another car parked in a similar place, because there's a small tree just next to it, and the roof is perfect leverage to jump up and claw at those pesky birds sitting pretty up there. But how can you _really_ tell there's cats hanging around your car late at night? As I discovered a couple of days ago, if there's a small fur-covered fake mouse left on the street just next to your automobile, that's how. Why, those reprobates!

Posted by h0l211 at 03:11 PM